State appointed advocacy group

If you want to learn how the Public Service Commission lost the trust of both Republicans and Democrats over the global warming bill, you’ll want to read the latest from Patrick McIlheran.

The Public Service Commission, our regulator of power rates, weighed in with a study arguing the mandate would save money. Aside from that study’s weird assumptions and outright errors, this raises a question: Why is the referee weighing in on the game?

That’s the other benefit of the mandates’ demise: This year at least, there is no payoff for manipulations by the pro-windmill interests.

Manipulate they did. More evidence emerged last weekend when a lawmaker used an open records request to unearth e-mails between a lobbyist for the environmentalist group 1000 Friends of Wisconsin and Eric Callisto, the Doyle-appointed chairman of the PSC.

It’s a small but telling matter: In 2007, the Governor’s Task Force on Global Warming was deciding whether to impose California’s car emission standards on Wisconsin. Callisto e-mailed the lobbyist, a task force member named Steve Hiniker, to offer help. General Motors was going to tell the committee just how costly the standards would be. Hiniker’s group said it couldn’t muster a suitably impressive response, “nor can we afford to buy the kind of presentation that is needed to refute there (sic) presentation,” he wrote to Callisto – after the chairman said he’d heard of Hiniker’s plight.

Hiniker asked whether the state could pay to fly in a California regulator to refute GM. Within a week, state money got spent, apparently at Callisto’s arranging, to make this happen.

Was this proper? Legal? Usual? I got no answer out of Callisto’s office after a week of asking, but the lawmaker who uncovered the maneuver, Rep. Brett Davis (R-Oregon), said “a line was crossed.” The problem, he said, wasn’t the money, a small amount, but the way regulators allowed themselves to be enlisted into a political fight.

“They were trying to make it all work for the governor,” he said. “They weren’t listening to what these industries were saying.”

So is it your position that only the party with the big bucks should be heard on these issues? That seems to be what your post is saying.

And if that is, in fact, what you’re saying should we just start dumping pharmacdeutical wastes straight into the Wabash River this afternoon and give up?

The name of the group is the PUBLIC SERVICE Commission. It isn’t the roll over and wet yourself when GM enters the room commission . It isn’t the give away the farm commission–although that’s a.pretty good characterization of what the FCC has done with the public airwaves.

These are consumer protection agencies. They have a mandate to hear both sides, even when that’s unpleasant for the McIver Institution and its corporate masters.

They have a mandate to be impartial, but here they sacrificed their integrity in pursuit of the governor’s agenda. They’re the group that published a suspiciously poorly-done analysis to whore themselves out for the governor’s global warming bill. They’re the ones that sacrificed their credibility in the eyes of both the Democrats and the Republicans that saw through the “analysis.” You have a gripe, then the fault lies with Eric Callisto, Mark Meyer, and Lauren Azar, not with their critics.